Harold Davis - The Way of the Digital Photographer: Walking the Photoshop post-production path to more creative photography

Looking at the bright red poppies from my garden, I envisioned an image that best showed off their bright color and translucency. To accomplish the first goal, I knew I needed to combine the red flowers with another color that would complement them. So I purchased some blue irises from a supermarket. To accomplish the second goal, I shot the flowers straight down on a light box, combining the different exposures as layers in Photoshop. The finished image is much along the lines of what I saw in my minds eye when I pre-visualized it. In this case, the road from pre-visualization to final image took planning, work, and timeand I feel the results warrant the effort.

50mm macro lens, eight exposures at shutter speeds ranging from 1/30 of a second to 4 seconds; each exposure at f/11 and ISO 100, tripod mounted; exposures combined in Photoshop.

Your digital camera probably resembles a film camera in both appearance and basic functionality. Like a film camera, your digital camera has a lens with aperture and shutter controls that can be used to decide how much light penetrates into the body of the camera for each shot.

But thats where the similarities between film and digital cameras end. Despite the similarity in appearance of the hardware device used to make the exposures, digital photography is an entirely new medium compared to film photography.

Historically, chemical properties of film and developing were used to record light that entered the camera. Today with a digital camera, the light is captured as a digital signal by a sensor. Digital signal data recorded by the sensor can be processed by the computer in your camera. More powerfully, and heres where the fun really begins, image data saved by your camera can be processed on a standalone computer after you upload your files.

People dont fully understand this new digital medium that consists of the camera-computer partnership. Theyre still hooked on the fact that their handheld computer with a lens (a.k.a. a digital single-lens-reflex, or DSLR) looks like a good old-fashioned film cameraand if it looks like one, it must work like one. Not so. For those who get over this misunderstanding, the door is wide open for experimentation and new approaches.

Digital is different. Very different.

One of the main goals of The Way of the Digital Photographer is to show you how to take advantage of this difference to enrich your own work.

With digital photography, it is my contention that your computer, and the image-processing software that runs on it, is an integral part of the image-creation process. It may be even more important as a creative tool than the camera itself.

You can easily see this difference when you use your iPhone camera, where more than half the fun is processing camera-phone images through a variety of image-manipulation apps.

To make the most of the creative potential of digital photography, you need to understand what can be done in post-processing and how post-production techniques should inform both your photographic choices and your overall workflow.

On my way to teach a workshop session on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California, the world seemed veiled in clouds. At one vista point, I decided to stop and just wait awhile so that I could get a sense of the weather and its movements. In the hopes that the vista might clear, I took out my gear and set it up.

As I watched the scene, the distant basins and peaks of the Panamint Range were invisible, hidden in a dense swirl of fog and cloud.

But then, for a brief instant, the clouds lifted, and I was able to peer through my lens at range after range of valleys filled with low-hanging clouds, lit by the light of the sun. Thankfully, I was ready to go. A few seconds after I clicked the shutter, the view was gone.

In post-production, I worked to enhance the sense that sunlight was streaming through a clouded landscape that a moment before had been completely overcast.